1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image encoding apparatus that efficiently encodes image data while suppressing degradation in image quality.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order to deal with an increase in speed of image encoding process, a constitutions has been proposed in which a plurality of encoding devices are operated in parallel with each other. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. H09-238334 discloses a constitution in which an input video signal is divided into a plurality of blocks per picture, and N (N is a natural number of two or more) encoding devices simultaneously encode and output video signals at same pixel positions in each block separately from each other. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. H11-346366 discloses a constitution in which encoding object data is divided into a plurality of pieces of partial data, the divided partial data are allocated to a plurality of encoding means, and next partial data is further allocated sequentially to encoding means that have completed the encoding of the allocated partial data.